Jason is a Principal Designer at Chewy.com, helping lead their design system efforts across ecommerce, enterprise, and native mobile app experiences. Prior to joining Chewy, he led the team in creating a new web platform for the State of Rhode Island; redefined the typography and design system for the State of Georgia Digital Service; and helped numerous type foundries, web browsers, and software companies figure out how to make the most of the new variable font format in their products and brands.
Jason also researches and writes on typography for the web: a collection of [newsletters on his site RWT.io(https://rwt.io/typography-tips), author of Responsive Typography from O’Reilly, as well as articles for .Net Magazine, PRINT Magazine, HOW, Monotype.com, TYPE Magazine, and others. He’s also a frequent guest on podcasts, and an author of online courses for Aquent’s Gymnasium platform and Front-end Masters, and has presented at over 100 national and international conferences. He also had the honor of being inducted into the Rhode Island Design Hall of Fame in 2019.
The real story: mainly he just follows Leo around Turner Reservoir, posting photos on Instagram.
Modern design systems for the web and mobile applications have become very good at supporting their content—but that content is usually very narrowly focused and singular of purpose. Their typographic systems are optimized in a similar way: to support the presentation of any content in a consistent and easily understood manner.
But accommodating anything means optimizing nothing—leaving us with endless sameness across the digital landscape. Since the modern web is driven by dynamic content systems, we can embrace modern techniques in CSS (the style language for the web) and technologies like variable fonts to build greater flexibility into those content systems, enabling us to support any content while still customizing the typesetting for individual articles or pages.
We’ll look at examples showcasing how we can typeset headlines that scale with the screen, design promotional elements with flair, and even set variable axes for specific passages or headlines right in the browser during the content publishing process.
Great editorial design truly can make the leap from printed page to pixel screens—it just takes a great typeface, a good eye, and a little technical finesse.
